Castle Orchard (32 page)

Mrs Arthur waited in the dining room with Phil, who she thought very pale. She said, thinking he had been too nervous to speak in front of Captain Allington, ‘What did give you such a fright?’

He replied, ‘Only the river, but I didn’t get wet.’

Annie put jonquils, spring flowers, on the table, to celebrate Captain Allington’s return.

‘You all like him,’ Mrs Arthur said, something she would never have said to the other servants.

‘We know where we are,’ Annie replied. ‘He’s fair, but I never would leave you and the dear children.’

Mrs Arthur knew when Annie said fair she meant more than that, but Annie would not know how to put it into words. It was the power of a good officer who could make his wishes theirs.

Annie said, ‘Cook is cross. She wanted to do something special to send down to the lodge but he gave us no warning. I don’t know where gentlemen think food comes from, that’s what Cook says.’

When they had had dinner and Annie was clearing the plates, Captain Allington returned.

He said, ‘Excuse me, I’m disturbing your evening but I wanted to say something to Phil.’

Mrs Arthur said, with an uncertain smile, ‘You need not apologise for entering your own house.’

‘I suppose I need not,’ he replied, but with an unaccustomed vagueness. He turned to Phil and said, ‘Every day you will hit the punching bag in the stable. When you can hit it hard, Dan will teach you to box.’

‘But I don’t want to hit anybody,’ Phil said, startled.

‘I dare say not, but nevertheless, you must learn it. My stepbrothers will go fifty miles to a prize fight, but it’s not of the least interest to me. For a boy, as an accomplishment, it’s invaluable.’

‘If you want me to do it, then I will.’

Allington glanced at Mrs Arthur. He said, ‘Of course, if your mother doesn’t wish it, we will think no more about it.’

Mrs Arthur thought her opinion on the matter entirely immaterial and that she was consulted only out of politeness. Captain Allington seemed, at that minute, to calmly assume the role of a father.

Phil was tired and went to bed early. He slipped away, trying to see himself in the role of a Jackson or a Belcher, prize fighters, but it seemed unlikely.

Mrs Arthur said to Allington, ‘I hope you will take tea.’ She went into the drawing room. There was a gown of Emmy’s she was lengthening. ‘I wanted to thank you for sending the pony for Phil.’ She thought how he had reappeared, like the genie from the lamp. Whatever had occurred to so frighten Phil had done away with explanations and formal greetings, but he had altered.

Annie brought the tea in earlier than usual. She said, ‘Cook and me didn’t think you ought to be late, seeing as you’ve been travelling, sir. That Pride thought you’d be cross, but ’tis only for your good, Cook and me says.’

Allington said, ‘Thank you, Annie.’ He turned to Mrs Arthur. ‘Phil may as well have Joe. My nephews have outgrown him. I brought him back from Waterloo, or somebody did. Major Wilder brought his baggage pony back from the Peninsula for his niece, so I suppose I grasped that idea. Joe is old now.’

Mrs Arthur made the tea and Allington took the cup from her, relapsing into silence. He sat down by the window. There was still daylight left and he seemed absorbed by the garden.

Mrs Arthur, wondering if they were ever to speak again, said, ‘Tell me what you are thinking.’

‘I was thinking of the sundial. What times will it tell by moonlight? I should be able to calculate that.’

‘Perhaps it goes backwards.’

‘That would suit me very well, forward in the day and backwards at night, like Penelope unpicking her tapestry, time suspended, the hourglass turned and turned so the sand never ran out.’

‘Are Emmy and Phil never to grow up and am I to be altering this hem for ever and ever?’

‘Yes, but you should not need to alter the hem if Emmy is never to grow. Well, time won’t stand still and we shall continue to wind the clocks.’

‘If time had stood still, you might still be in Cornwall. It’s the place of your childhood, so perhaps home.’

‘Yes, that is so, but it is also the place of illness, of being too feeble to do more than lie and look out of the window at a distant strip of the sea. If I’m to be so ill again I should prefer to die. I’m too much reminded of Brussels. I lay day after day, in a house there, a respectable merchant’s house. My room was white, the bed was white and the hangings were white. There were no pictures. The window looked on to the street but I could only see the windows of the opposite house, which appeared to be unoccupied. They never altered. How well I remember that room, every fold in the hangings of the bed, the single chair, the table, the washstand, the medicines. My hostess was dutiful. She grudged me nothing, but I never saw her smile. There was a young girl in the house, some sort of cousin, about fourteen years old. No, older, I suppose. She had a long, flaxen plait and used to skip in and out, running errands. I fell madly in love with her. She was a cheerful child, light-hearted, and in her exuberance inclined to knock over the few things in the room. They were always saying “Hush, remember the poor, wounded soldier.” At least, I believe that is what they were saying. I was too ill to grasp the language.’

Allington came to a halt.

Mrs Arthur, after a while, said, ‘And did she reciprocate your affections?’

‘I never spoke to her nor she to me. I believe she spoke no French, the only language we might have had in common.’ Allington smiled. ‘I don’t think I can have been at my best, my head shaved and bandaged, my arms bandaged, my chest too, my leg in a splint. There I lay, often delirious, always in pain, waiting to die but never quite doing so, quietly teasing myself with a passion for this girl.’

Mrs Arthur thought of this flaxen-haired girl he had so oddly loved.

‘I expect,’ he continued, ‘she is now a matron with her hair arranged on top of her head, and several blond babies. Time will not have stood still.’

He got up and said abruptly, ‘I wish you good night.’

After he had gone, she laid down her sewing. She thought of him with those Spanish girls, with this Flemish child. Was he trying to tell her how transitory were his affections? From the window she could see him walking down to the lodge in the half-light.

Robert Conway found no consolation in the uniform. The three rows of silver buttons, the velvet facings, mocked him. Captain Allington’s words, ‘unbefitting an officer or a gentleman’, returned to him at every moment of the day. His uncle, now long dead, who had once shrugged his living form into the tight green jacket, would never have forgiven him. Sometimes he tried to shift the blame, to accuse his brothers or Phil, but he knew those terrible words would haunt him for ever. He repeated them to himself again and again.

The rector noticed that his son was in a state of disharmony and, as the rector was not accustomed to observations so close to home, he became uneasy and addressed him on the subject. ‘You are out of sorts, my boy. You are growing too fast. Why are you not out of doors? Do not the woods, the river, the meadows of Castle Orchard beckon you?’

‘I can’t go to Castle Orchard,’ Robert said sulkily.

‘My dear boy, why not? We may not have become much acquainted with Captain Allington, but he has not forbidden more humble folk the benefit of his park.’

‘He has me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. He has only just returned. You must have misunderstood him, or been engaged in some childish prank. I am sure he meant no permanent ban.’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Pray, tell me why.’

‘No, I can’t. It was silly. It was nothing.’ Robert flung this at his father as he made a retreat, hastening outdoors into the rectory shrubbery for fear of being forced to tell the truth. Here he crouched on the ground beneath the laurels and plotted enlisting as a common soldier. A few tears spilled down his cheeks. He would go as a volunteer and get his commission and be killed. Robert, his mind running away with him, saw a hundred ways in which he might redeem himself, death being the most satisfactory.

Mr Conway, giving up any thought of the duties he had intended for the morning, walked to Castle Orchard and sent in his card, begging Annie to plead his cause with Captain Allington in allowing him a few minutes of his time. He saw that his nephews, Jacky and James, had followed him.

‘Run home, little boys,’ he said. ‘Uncle is busy.’

Allington, who had just been seeing the agent, received the rector’s message.

‘He begs just a few minutes, sir,’ Annie said. ‘He is a kind gentleman, Mr Conway is, and means good.’

‘But is he useful, Annie?’

Annie thought about this. She then said, ‘Seeing we must have a rector to remind us of our Christian souls and to say our prayers and love our neighbours, why, then he must be useful, sir.’

‘And we can’t do this for ourselves?’

‘And we must be married and buried and baptised, sir,’ Annie continued, ignoring his questions and thinking her arguments in favour of the rector conclusive. ‘He is a good man even if he doesn’t understand ordinary folk too well.’

Allington had the rector admitted and sat down opposite him in the morning room into which spring sunshine streamed and there was a fine view of the river.

‘What may I do for you?’ he asked.

‘It is my earnest wish to be on cordial terms with you,’ the rector started. ‘Of course the rectory living ought to be yours, but the late Mr Arthur, of whom I can’t bring myself to speak, sold it as quick as he could. Nevertheless, for myself as the rector not to be on good terms with you, the landlord, let alone yourself as my neighbour, would, I feel, be injurious to the parish, and my first consideration must be the parish.’

‘And mine too,’ Allington said, ‘seeing how much of it I own. The care of their souls I must leave to you, seeing you have the better authority in that department.’

Emboldened by Allington’s conciliatory manner, Mr Conway said, ‘It sets a better example if the landlord regularly attends his place of worship, meaning by this the church.’ He added nervously, ‘I have mentioned it before.’

‘Should you not plead with me to attend church for the sake of my soul rather than merely as an example?’

‘That too, of course.’

‘I feared you were putting the example first.’

The rector, confused, said nothing.

Allington said, ‘I don’t object to attending church. Where should I sit?’

The rector immediately saw a dilemma. Each pew in his church was allocated and jealously guarded by the occupants, even if only tenant farmers and their wives, except for the ones at the back where sat the poorer parishioners. Mrs Arthur continued to use the Castle Orchard pew but she ought to give it up to Captain Allington.

Allington gave him a quizzical look and then said, ‘You came to see me about something other than this?’

‘Ah yes, my boy Robert. He is very out of sorts. He tells me you have forbidden him your grounds. I could not imagine this to be so, the people always having been allowed in the park.’

‘The people are allowed in the park, or to cross it, which is as much as they ever seem to do. Otherwise it is so. I have forbidden all your sons my grounds.’

‘May I ask the reason?’ the rector said, agitated.

‘What reason did they give?’

‘It was only Robert to whom I spoke. He gave no reason.’

‘If he has not given you his confidence in the matter, it would be most wrong for me to do so. I will tell you nothing he is unwilling to tell you himself.’

‘I see it is more serious than I thought.’ Mr Conway was about to embark on the difficulties of fatherhood when the door was unceremoniously opened and the twins came in.

‘Oh, naughty boys, what are they doing here, bursting in without a by-your-leave and I told them to go home? They never heed anyone. I must apologise, sir.’

Jacky and James crossed the room at a trot and went straight to Captain Allington. Simultaneously they tugged his sleeve.

Jacky whispered, ‘Quick.’

James whispered, ‘In the river.’

Allington leaped to his feet. The boys ran and he followed them, soon overtaking them, across the garden to the river.

Where the river bent round the Philosopher’s Tower a willow tree leaned into the water. There stood Phil, up to his waist, one hand desperately clasping a branch and with the other trying to hold on to Emmy and to keep her above the water. Allington plunged into the river. He scooped up Emmy and put her over his shoulder. Phil he took by the hand and said, ‘Now Phil, I am holding you steady. Walk out of the water with me.’

They reached the bank safely. The twins had vanished. Emmy spluttered as Allington laid her over his knee and shook the water from her. She started to scream. ‘Where is Dolly? I want Dolly. Jacky and James threw her in the water and I went to get her.’

Allington thought Dolly had met a watery grave. He said, ‘Never mind Dolly. You are lucky to be alive.’ He stood Emmy on her feet and gave her a bit more of a shake. ‘Now, miss, there is a rule that you may not go down to the river. The river is deep and you are small. You have broken that rule and you are punished for it.’

He hastened them up to the house to get out of their wet clothes. They were met by Mr Conway, who had never understood why Captain Allington had departed from him in the first place.

‘Dear, oh dear, they have fallen in the river and Jacky and James came to say so. The river is not safe for children. Are they all right? They will catch their deaths and what will poor Mrs Arthur do then?’

‘They will not catch their deaths. Go to Annie and get her to make up a fire. Where is Mrs Arthur?’

‘Annie says she went to the village to see the blacksmith’s wife who has just been confined with another baby girl. Dear, oh dear. What an occurrence. I shall fetch Mrs Arthur.’

In the house Annie soon had blankets, a fire and warm drinks. The children sat there in silence, like two little mummies, shocked. Allington withdrew and watched them from a distance. Seeing Mrs Arthur running towards the house, he pushed the casement up and called to her, ‘Don’t be too alarmed. They are both safe.’